Greg Lehey put up a paper and slides from his Singapore presentation, describing the FreeBSD-5 SMPng work, both in terms of events and code. It’s an interesting read, since this is the path avoided in DragonFly. (Greg Lehey has a 2001 USENIX paper on SMPng, too, which mentions much of the same content.)

On the freebsd-hackers mailing list, a slight flamewar erupted over discussion of checkpointing code from DragonFly. Amidst the dumbness that normally ensues in a flamewar, there’s some interesting descriptions on what work has been done/will be done on DragonFly. Check out the archive, mostly in the “FreeBSD mail list etiquette” thread. Matt Dillon’s posts here, here, and here are all info-packed.

Kip Macy’s checkpointing code has been committed; I’m pasting Matt Dillon’s post about it as there’s a lot of issues to consider.

For those of you late to the party, checkpointing allows you to “freeze” a copy of an application so that, in theory, you can restore the program to that running state at a later point in time. Useful, for instance, if you have a program that takes a long time to complete and you don’t want to have to restart from the beginning if there’s an interruption.More…

David Cuthbert brought up the idea of Doxygen headers for the source; Matt Dillon didn’t care for the idea, pointing at this for an example. Hiten Pandya noted that he’d like to have a separate by-hand handbook, for which Eirik Nygaard posted a possible example. Matthew Fuller added that he is working on a SGML application for library documentation as part of another project.

While noting that he has made a number of changes to the scheduler, Matt Dillon described a new tool called ‘wmake’. wmake allows you to run make in a subdirectory simulating a buildworld environment, without actually having to build world.

(quoted from his post, using libkvm for an example:)cd /usr/lib/libkvm
wmake obj
wmake
make install

Emiel Kollof noted that it would be nice if the splash screen loaders could read gzipped files, so that any splash screens could be stored in a compressed format and still used. Hiten Pandya pointed at kern/imgact_gzip.c and boot/i386/kgzldr/boot.c for examples, if anyone wants to tackle this project.

David Leimbach noted that Ron Minnich was porting Plan 9 namespaces to FreeBSD, which duplicates some of the security features to be covered by VFS. Ron Minnich’s web page has more data on this and other technologies.

Joshua Coombs noted he would like to work on a new firewall strategy for DragonFly, and pasted in some of his notes. They are complex enough that it’s better to paste than to sum up. (I sure could use the multiple routes he talks about.)

It looks like the PC Card problems mentioned earlier are really a problem with the DHCP client. David Rhodus is looking for someone to try a new import of the ISC DHCP code. (Updated – an import from FreeBSD-5 is happening instead, since that fixes some problems with the most recent ISC code.)

Galen Sampson found that using NFS without -maproot will cause file truncation; Matt Dillon has a temporary hack that will fix it, which will be committed by the end of the week if it works without trouble.

Mike Porter wrote an extended entry about how variant symlinks could handle multiple versions of ports being installed, including a number of special cases like Perl and the modules installed for it.More…